Think college is critical? Sorry to burst your bubble

Hanging out with your chums in a dorm was a swell scene in the 1950s, but it just might be as dated as letterman sweaters. (Hulton Archive, Getty Images)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Millions of Americans are borrowing enormous amounts of money for an investment that, historically, has provided a good return. But now prices have risen beyond all logic, forming a bubble that could burst at any moment and condemn countless debt-laden suckers to the poorhouse.

This time, though, the culprit isn't a cornfield McMansion or a sketchy dot-com. It's college.

A slew of recent books, articles and blog posts have taken a skeptical look at the value of higher education, concluding that many diplomas are scarcely worth the sheepskin they're printed on. The critics say too many people go to college and too few take rigorous courses, emerging after a Bacchanalian five or six years with a huge pile of loans and negligible job skills. (Sadly, the ability to construct a beer bong out of a fish tank and a garden hose remains undervalued by employers.)

This cannot continue, the doubters say. Families are broke. The government is broke. A crash is inevitable, and when it happens, enrollments will plunge, universities will close and once-coddled professors will wander the streets, hollow-cheeked and wolf-eyed, bearing signs that read: "Will Explicate for Food."

"Higher education is one big bailout," said Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist. "… It's unsustainable in the very long run, and the only question is how long we're talking about."

Not everyone buys this scenario, but as the anxiety builds, interesting ideas are starting to emerge about paths to success that don't involve college.

One of them comes from Silicon Valley. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has pledged to give 20 young people $100,000 apiece to halt their formal educations and start businesses.

He argues that if someone has the intelligence and passion to achieve a technological breakthrough, sitting in a classroom is a waste of time. But aside from uncovering a few promising entrepreneurs, he says, he wants to create a new model of aspiration.

"Everyone thinks kids in inner-city Detroit should do something else," he recently told an interviewer. "We're saying maybe people at Harvard need to be doing something else. We have to reset what the bar is at the top."

Another investor, James Altucher, claims he doesn't want his own children to go to college because vital career skills are best learned elsewhere — say, at a comedy club.

"(Doing standup) will teach you how to write," he wrote in a blog post earlier this year. "How to communicate. How to sell yourself. How to deal with people who hate you. How to deal with the psychology of failure on a daily basis. And, of course, how to make people laugh. All of these items will help you later in life much more than Philosophy 101 will."

Coming from the wealthy, such ideas can sound like a modern version of "Let them eat cake." But consider the point of view of Joe Lamacchia. He's a Newton, Mass., landscaper whose book and website, "Blue Collar and Proud of It," attempt to raise the status of those who work in the trades.

Lamacchia said he resisted pressure to go to college when he was a young man, feeling he wouldn't get much out of it. Instead, he got his education from neighbors who owned construction companies and were willing to teach him the business. One early lesson, he recalled, came when an old-timer used a napkin to demonstrate how to build a wall.

"I think humans have forgotten that not everything is taught from a blackboard," he said.

Vedder predicted that employers, burned by too many lunkhead college graduates, might come to distrust the value of a diploma and turn to standardized tests as a hiring tool. But John Challenger of the Chicago outplacement firm of Challenger, Gray and Christmas has his doubts.

He pointed out that the unemployment rate for people with a bachelor's degree is 4.4 percent — less than half of the rate for those who have only a high school diploma.

"It's very risky not to get (a college degree)," Challenger said. "For me, those numbers are just too compelling."

Same here. I sock away money for my kids' education even though I vaguely fear I'm being set up as a chump. I've met plenty of impressive people who didn't need college to learn the things that really help a person get ahead — focus, ambition, perseverance — and plenty of multiple degree holders who were utterly adrift.

Yet we're still stuck in a society that worships credentials. That model is showing some cracks, as demonstrated by the growing cynicism about college, but I expect it to hold fast for years to come — at least until my kids are out of school.

Still, part of me wishes that when they turn 18, they'll announce that they're skipping higher ed to play semipro basketball, bum their way to China or take their band on the road. They'd get an education far beyond anything they'd learn hanging around good ol' State U.